Embracing color

Architecture & Interiors

The painter-architect Le Corbusier did something artistic with the houses at Pessac. He embraced color and achieved a sense of weightlessness by painting the surfaces in different light colors. At the corners where the colors meet, a sense of structural thickness got also lighter. Le Corbusier’s considered color an important feature of his buildings and used color with an approach he defined as : ” the powerful hum of color.”

5o individual houses that were built around 1920’s became the examples of early modernism.

They have built as experimental workers houses and exposed to many violations till today.

However, it is still considered a“cohesive whole” and “even with the loss of key elements of the Corbusian style – the precise repetition of open and closed geometries, the visual sense of the thin concrete, the painterly abstraction of the original colored facades – the settlement retained an impressive and recognizable integrity. Pessac was a very pleasant place to be. And these houses were clearly survivors.” source: NYT architectural view